A recent article I spied on the CNN news site made me start thinking, very hard, about the state of religion in the United States. According to a recent poll:
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
Even though I am not personally a Christian, and I have not been since I was a child, I found those figures extremely shocking – until I began to think about my own experiences with American Protestant Christianity, especially during a recent and particularly difficult year I spent in southeastern Kansas.
Like anyone who lives in the United States, I cannot avoid having some friends who are of the Protestant Christian persuasion, and of those friends that I know very well, there are several that I do respect highly on the grounds of morality, kindness, compassion and charity – including, but not limited to, a specific couple living in southeastern Kansas and at least one man living and caring for his mother in Kansas City, Missouri – right in the heart of the American Midwest. However, in my experience, such individuals are sadly the exception and not at all the rule for Christians, and this does seem especially true of a particular type of self-styled Christian living in the American Midwest.
The overwhelmingly vocal majority of American Protestant Christians seem to be xenophobic to an absurd degree. In case you don’t speak English very well, xenophobic is a term that encompasses, among other traits, racism. If it doesn’t look like you, and if it doesn’t talk like you, it really isn’t fully human and doesn’t deserve the compassion or kindness we would show to one of “our own.”
The term xenophobic doesn’t only refer to race, however. It literally translates more or less as fear of difference, fear of outsiders or fear of that which is foreign or alien. Xenophobes are the folks who would love to see illegal immigrants – most of them starving and desperately looking for work – very badly treated or even killed. Sadly, they are mostly getting their wish these days.
My own personal experience has mostly been with those self-styled Christians who honestly believe that Pagans and/or Witches are devil-worshippers and would like to see all of us dead. My life and property have been threatened by this sort of Christian on numerous occasions over the last 35 years – and even the lives of my innocent pets. Knowing what I do know of the purported teachings of Jesus of Nazareth – and my childhood education certainly did not neglect Sunday School – it is more than clear to me that these self-styled Christians have absolutely no idea at all what their faith is even about.
In fact, the only sane response to their behavior toward me over the years can be summed up very succinctly in three one-syllable words, “Lock and load.”
Christianity, because it teaches that life is just a temporary phase on the way to eternal reward or punishment, has always been a faith that lends itself all too easily to cults. Christians take up monetary collections during their services – shaming even the very poor into giving what they cannot afford – and if you think that isn’t a lucrative practice, just visit your nearest Baptist church on Sunday morning and do the math. Christian leaders have extremely lucrative reasons to try to control every facet of their followers’ lives from bank accounts to sex lives – and that is the very definition of a cult. Yet because they call themselves Christian, we dare not say so.
The unfortunate truth is that Christian fanatics have been committing crimes (on this continent) in the name of their faith since the murdered women of Salem, Massachusetts, in the late 17th Century, and even before – they like to call these murdered Salem women Witches, and that somehow makes it all right. The women involved could not possibly have been modern Witches, as what we called Wicca or Witchcraft today did not even exist at the time. The play/movie, The Crucible, appears to show that a jealous wife used a slave’s Caribbean Voodoo and the town’s witchcraft hysteria to bring about the multiple murders of her perceived rivals – all in the name of devout Christianity. I don’t know how accurate the story is, but it certainly rings true.
Today, the Christian cults’ modus operandi seems to be more along the lines of blowing up abortion clinics and threatening President Obama because he is black and – oh, horrors – has the middle name of “Hussein.”
I don’t happen to think Obama is the new messiah as some American folks seem to think. In fact, I have some very serious issues with the man. My issues with our current president, however, are political in nature and have zero to do with Obama personally or with his race.
When a religion forfeits its moral compass – as any advocate of torture has surely done, whether the victim of torture is to be Muslim or not, even terrorist or not – and when said religion teaches fear and cruelty instead of faith and love, it no longer deserves the label – or the constitutional protections – of religion.
The Taliban do not deserve the label of Muslim, and neither do the hate-mongers of Al Qaeda. Why should these sick sects of Christians infesting our Midwest be any different? I have no more desire to live under a Christian Taliban than under a Muslim one, and in either case, I will defend my life and freedom with my blood. Nor will I ever allow torture to be done in my name. If it takes the rest of my life, I will not cease from advocating the trial and punishment of those who ordered, those who justified, and those who carried out torture in the last administration. If we do not punish them, it may happen again, and that is unthinkable.
I suspect that most Americans would still agree with me.
Posted under Civil Rights, Freedom, Injustice, Politics
This post was written by Kate on May 1, 2009
